The year is 1907; the place, London. Picture a romance between Lilia Brooke, anticlerical, militant suffragist who believes in “free union” rather than marriage, and Paul Harris, an Anglican canon, and you have the premise of Impossible Saints. What’s more, Paul hates even the idea of a “free union,” because his mother left his father to live with another man. Finally, as a young cleric on a rapid rise, he’d do well to steer clear of Lilia for the sake of his career prospects.

More than four decades ago, I first read George Dangerfield’s classic history of the Edwardian era, The Strange Death of Liberal England, which I highly recommend. I can still recall the hair-raising chapters about Emmeline Pankhurst, arguably the most famous (if not the most influential) suffragist in the English-speaking world, and her daughter, Christabel, both of whom took a great deal of physical and verbal abuse for the cause. (Another daughter, Sylvia, was also involved in the movement.) Lilia Brooke, though fictional, is cut from their cloth, a woman who feels that eloquent speeches and pamphlets aren’t enough, though she excels at both. Rather, she must take her cause to the streets in ways that can’t be ignored, and, like any honest militant, she leads from out front. Consequently, Paul and Lilia have decisions to make.

I was delighted to find Harwood’s novel and surprised that it’s the first I’ve ever heard of to portray the suffrage movement in that time and place. I like honest political romances, by which I mean those where both partners are committed, body and soul, to their beliefs, rather than stories in which philosophical differences provide a handy device to keep the lovers apart for a while. I further applaud Harwood’s passion for the era and her understanding and love for the ideas that shaped it. In our politically fractious age, it’s thought-provoking to read about lovers whose undeniable attraction risks foundering on divergent beliefs about morality and justice.

But I wish that Impossible Saints offered a more vivid, nuanced, less predictable narrative. Told almost entirely through dialogue, a choice that demands authorial skill and the reader’s patience, the novel feels like a tract or a running debate.

The discussions have their moments, as when Lilia gently skewers a wealthy businessman and professed Darwinist by asking whether he should hire more women just to see whether they are better fitted to the work than men. More usually, however, speech and thought seem too intellectual, even for the main characters, whose scholarly pursuits led to their initial attraction. Take this passage, for example, where Paul visits a “penitentiary,” a place that purportedly exists to rehabilitate “fallen women”:

Paul had entertained two incompatible expectations of these women — the romantic, sorrowful, lovely unfortunates of Pre-Raphaelite paintings on the one hand, and the gaudy, brash, painted courtesans of legend on the other. Neither expectation was realized. What surprised Paul most was how ordinary and young Mary looked. She couldn’t have been older than seventeen, yet her face was sober and intelligent, reminding him of his father’s upper servants. Was this one of the wicked, abandoned creatures that many of his colleagues spoke out against from the pulpit?

I have no doubt that Harwood’s observations here are dead on, and I believe implicitly that Paul has never considered a woman like this for who she is. But I don’t think he’s really seeing her now, either, for the description feels pigeonholed, generic, even academic, and since it’s a key moment, his reaction should be visceral. I get that he doesn’t reveal his feelings to others, though they run deep, but aside from described internal states, they’re hard to find. As such, I feel sympathy and interest in viewpoints and where those will lead, but am less compelled by the characters who hold them.

There’s little or no external vividness, either. Emmeline Pankhurst, who surely deserves at least a line of physical description, receives none (and neither Christabel nor Sylvia is even mentioned). Impossible Saints has little grounding in any particular place, and neither London nor the early twentieth century comes alive in its pages.

Artless is the word that comes to mind about this novel, in its simplicity, which can be charming, but also in its lack of subtlety or surprise. With apologies to Paul’s profession, so much of this book feels ordained; when anything appears the least out of the ordinary, you can bet it will work its effects in the next chapter or so, and you can guess what they’ll be. Conversations feel direct, to the point, and resolved, and though occasional misunderstandings arise, people seldom, if ever, interrupt or talk past each other.

Impossible Saints is a novel about ideas, less so the people who hold them. And though those ideas are powerful and timely, the narrative never quite takes flight.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

What a marvelous bunch these Melvilles are, minor Hampshire aristocracy who keep the new twentieth century at arm’s length. Sir Aubrey Melville, Bart., cares for nothing except his estate, Ellinghurst, whose manse is an architectural oddity, and whose three-hundred-year history he’s been writing forever. As for Lady Melville, if snobbery were a lethal weapon, she’d have as much blood on her hands as Jack the Ripper. The Melville children–Theo, Phyllis, and Jessica, in descending order–know her as Eleanor, the only intimacy she allows them, though Theo occupies a throne in her heart. Phyllis has withdrawn from the family in favor of books, angering Jessica in particular, who craves excitement and dotes on Theo, a selfish, mercurial bully who likes nothing better than to take horrifying risks and push others to do likewise.

The lonely sailor trying to stay afloat in this maelstrom of dysfunction is Oskar Grunewald, a fatherless young boy, son of a family friend. When in the Melville children’s company, he’s either ignored or targeted for abuse, just as he is at school. But you know he’ll be the hinge on which the narrative turns; the typically pointless prologue tells you so. And you also know, because of the title, the year the real action begins (1910), and an epigraph dating from the First World War, that the Melvilles are in for it. We That Are Left evokes a familiar theme in fiction, Edwardian gentry struggling to understand–or, more accurately, refusing to understand–that they’re dinosaurs. Untimely death and estate taxes will destroy their way of life, but more than that, unavoidable social changes are coming, and their cosseted world will never be the same.

Punch cartoon satirizing the changes in women’s dress, 1901-11, published in the U.S., 1921 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

But if this message sounds familiar, as narrated in, say, Philip Rock’s Passing Bells, Clark goes much deeper. Her characters live what they say and believe, so that you never feel they’re talking heads, a collection of opinions. With one exception, Clark reveals their inner lives so naturally and vividly that in understanding them, you see their milieu and its ferment as clearly as if you were standing there. And since most of her characters other than Oskar are disagreeable, it’s a rare feat to make them compelling, let alone to stretch their story to 450 pages and keep you riveted. How does she do this? One passage, from Oskar’s perspective, gives a glimpse:

It was as if the nerves in him had been magnetised, irresistibly drawing sensation to his eyes, his lungs, his brain, his skin, until the intensity of it was almost too much to bear. He walked along the familiar streets in a daze of seeing, overcome by the greenness of the lawns and the blueness of the sky and the perfect pewter gleam of the cobbles beneath his feet, struck time and again by the loveliness of things he had somehow never noticed before: the round glass panes in an overhanging upper window like bottoms of bottles, the splintery grey grain of a warped medieval lintel, the straining neck and gripping claws of a pockmarked gargoyle clinging for dear life to a narrow ledge, its mouth stretched wide and its veined wings raised and half-opened, ready for flight. He had not thought the world so full of ordinary marvels.

Oskar’s in love, of course. But Clark never has to tell you that; she renders a primary emotion in its full physical intensity, without any mention of rapid heartbeat or breath. (That Oskar’s studying physics accounts for the metaphors about magnetism and colors.) I admire this artistry very much, which goes far beyond use of prose, and certainly not the kind that explodes like fireworks or calls attention to itself, which Clark’s doesn’t anyway. Rather, I enter Oskar’s mind and heart, just as I do those of the less sympathetic characters like Jessica, who’s selfish, spoiled, and manipulative. I don’t have to like her, but I can see her point of view and care about how she learns about life.

That said, not everyone will sit still for a long, character-driven novel, especially one that takes fifty pages to get going. There’s too much talk of theoretical physics, which, aside from being technical, rather too baldly fits the theme of the laws of nature challenged. And though Clark stands above many authors I’ve read recently for her gift at writing character, she’s taken shortcuts with Eleanor, who’s got little to show except her obsessive love for Theo, her only boy. It’s also startling that the ending, though prefigured by the needless prologue, feels like an improbable reversal, almost Dickensian in content, and melodramatic besides.

Even so, I enjoyed We That Are Left and learned something about writing novels.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.